There’s no daylight left in Michigan.

When you wander the streets of quaint towns like Holland, MI, you overhear things being said in the local language.  Most of these words are recognizable, but recently I heard a squawk of a word that should come with a warning.  Both parts of this word come with the flat A sound merged with a number of Y type noises.  Cover the ears of your children and say it with me: backtrack.

Beyehcktreyeck!

This kind of lust is for sun only.

I find it odd that someone in the town planning committee didn’t yell ‘backtrack’ when the they decided to roll out the town visual identity signage.  Conservative but suggestive – wow! This might be a spicy place after all.

Words like backtrack make me wish I knew more about linguistics.  Actually, I wish I knew more about a lot of things, or that I, at the very least, retained info that I know I used to know.  Have you ever opened up an old notebook from school and marveled at the type and scope of information you once retained?  Why, body, have I decided to forget useful back of the envelope math and instead decided to retain the memory of standing bent over in the middle school girls locker room, waiting patiently as the passive-aggressive gym teacher counted my vertebrae to make sure I didn’t have scoliosis?

This rainy, Michigan weekend is devoid of sunlight.  On one hand, I finished my indoor skateboard and now my bare feet can grip soft leather like never before.  On the other hand, the gods at Hulu keep trying to convince me that I’ll dance awkwardly and my eyelids might darken if I would only take

The internet thinks I would take a pill for 16 weeks for this...

Latisse.  Who wouldn’t risk permanent eye pigmentation for the chance at creepy eyelashes?

Can an ad be an ad without letting me know it’s an ad?  Will we ever get to the point that advertising is something I crave? As much as I like saying the word ODST, I’ll never play Halo.  I will, however, quickly succumb to any number of user experiences.  Tease, embed, dangle, lust, tactile, grasp, assume, embody…a stream of consciousness that I dare you to use on me.

It’s raining.  Can I get scoliosis from sitting on the couch?

Culminating in thirty minutes spent searching for video clips of Michael Phelps, my week of horizontality is officially over.

I’m an asterisk.  Last week I arrived home from a great trip to San Francisco and moved around the house in slow, heavy stomps.  Walls quivered as I leaned on them, faucets sweat as I gripped them, and couches groaned as my croaking mass of influenza lay sedentary for eight days.

I never got tested for H1N1 for a couple of reasons, all of them unacceptable.  First, since I’m new to this area, I haven’t found a doctor yet.  The thought of actually finding a doctor when you’re sick is daunting, and when you’re healthy, it’s boring.  I lay on the sofa sweating and the only doctors that I could think of were those that practice sedation dentistry.  Second, if I did have swine flu, I didn’t want to have to tell people I had it.  The new girl has swine flu. It would have ruined me at recess.  I will remain neatly tucked inside one of the sixty degree angles in the asterisk of H1N1 total cases.  If you read me in eight point font on the bottom of the page you’ll find out that I’ve done my part to widen the error bars for epidemiologists.

Don’t blame me, blame feta cheese.  It all began on my trip back from San Francisco when I boarded my delayed and twice switched flight from Chicago to Grand Rapids with a Greek salad I grabbed at O’Hare.  United smooshed me in a middle seat but with only 24 minutes of flying time I didn’t really care.  I ate what I thought was an innocent meal quietly in the darkened aircraft as we waited to push away from the gate.

The flight attendant walked slowly down the aisle and did a double take at our row.  She looked at me, “can you lift up your salad?”  “Lift it up?” I slowly raised it a few inches above my lap.  She leaned down in slow motion and took a big, strong, SNIFF.

“Yep, It’s your salad!”  She exclaimed while executing a perfect ‘bend and snap’ recoil for the now quiet aircraft that contains six of my new co-workers scattered about.

“Excuse me?”

“Your salad.  Your salad smells like throw up.  Someone said they thought they smelled throw up, but it’s your salad. The throw up smell is coming from your salad.”  Her proclamation was crisp each time she rephrased it.  I was sitting face to face with one of the life opportunities that you look back on with a thousand good things you could have, should have done.  Not wanting to ruin the moment the way she had ruined my dinner, I unbuckled and stood up half way in my chair:  “Don’t fear folks, it’s just feta.”  Silence.  At least I’d tried.

I ate a few more bites of throw up salad before closing it and shoving it in the seat pocket.  The short flight meant they didn’t come around to pick up trash, so I carried the scarlet letter off with me in a great display of not making eye contact with others.  The next day I was stricken.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGFRi_ueq-M&feature=player_embedded]I measured my recovery by my ability to compute.  I read no emails for three days and took another to write short replies that said I’d actually reply later.  As of last night I was looking for Super Mario Brothers emulators.  I watched three grainy clips of Michael Phelps, looked for more, and then it dawned on me.  I was better.

I’d like to see an online diagnosis tool that determines your level of illness based on the type of computing you can tolerate.  I’d also like to see a full size sculpture of that flight attendant bent at the waist, nose leading the way, made entirely out of feta.

Apparently, nobody sculpts in feta.

Traveling makes me eat donuts.

On Friday, I was the only person in the security line at Gerald Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, MI.  There still was a line though, because the woman reading the x-ray scans had yet to lose her diligence. My two computers, jacket, shoes, and two bags formed quite the queue for her to analyze, but I was fine with the extra time standing around in my socks as they were a great shade of teal and the floor looked clean and made the color pop.

My mental attitude was A+ with gold stars, high five.  I had just presented my California driver’s license as my form of identification. Maybe ‘they’ wouldn’t know I actually live in Michigan now, and only have 6 more days before my California registration runs out and I need to get a new license plate that will force me to blend in with the rest of my new state.  For that very moment I was securely a Californian, albeit one that can’t seem to locate the title to her car in order to change said registration, but that’s a worry for next week.

How long does it take to form an affinity to a new place? Michigan isn’t home, but I live in a fantastic apartment that is a great home.  I don’t look like Michigan yet, but my newness allows me to see what Michganders look like.  Yes, Michiganders is the correct word, synonymous with Michiganians. I feel a pressure to continuously exploit and overlay my life experiences on top of my new life, but that life isn’t mine yet. I’m a perpetual visitor, and it’s exhausting.

Maple-bacon donut by Dynamo Donuts. Photo by Yelp user Jonas T.

Is it comfortable and easy, then, to arrive back in San Francisco and take up ‘real life’ again? Quite the opposite.  It makes me drink obscene amounts of coffee. It makes me eat eight glorious meals a day.  It makes me eat donuts.

I pass a store that I once might have frequented weekly or monthly and a guttural panic pressures me to pound pastries and pizza.  “If I don’t eat it now, I won’t get a chance at it again, maybe for months.”  I look like a seagull with the face of a human.  I am a visitor again, in a place that used to be home.  Yesterday, I had coffee from three different places, plus breakfast, brunch, a bloody mary, and a bacon donut all before noon. For good measure, and my current pursuit of building skateboards, I also bought four super-soft pieces of leather for my indoor boards.  Is there anything more satisfying than bare feet on leather?

I love this city because it’s over-stimulating, and full of people that are always ten steps ahead of you in every dimension.  You can touch anything and smell anything and taste anything, and that’s not always a great thing, especially in the Mission, but it is nourishing.  Cities will continue to push and drive design simply because everyone has already thought of everything.  Ideas don’t always have to be world changing…DEEP BREATH between bites!

Cities revel in fantastic examples of the next small thing.

With that, I slide into salty specs of bacon on fried cake with maple icing.

On a CRJ 700 (that’s high-tech airplane speak for ‘small, cramped aircraft that only flies to cities in the Midwest’) if you happen to score seat 17B, the flight attendant sits right next to your face.

As part of its plan to emerge from financial ruin and regain more of its former customer base, United Airlines gives very special treatment to its formerly Premier passengers.  Yes, It places us in the back row of tiny aircraft, smooshed into the half-seats that accompany this fine machinery.  Seats 17B and 17C straddle the even more emaciated aisle, and the flight attendant straps herself into a jump seat that pulls down in between to block the bathroom, that instead of running water, has a big bottle of generic Purell gel sanitizer.

If I turned my head to the right, I could smack the flight attendant a big wet one on her cheek.  The proximity of her face to mine and the gentleman in 17C is enough for both of us to make our own uncomfortably awkward jokes, neither of which approaches advanced beginner on a comedy scale.  If this proximity isn’t enough, she pushes the discomfort one more notch up to a dark brown toast as she delivers the entire round of pre-flight announcements from this position.

Find someone that is sitting near you right now.  Sit side by side so you warm to each others body temperature.  Make sure your partner’s face is no more than four inches from yours. Now,  bring a microphone to your mouth and tell a story that everyone in the vicinity has heard before.  Are you mature enough for this experience? Please report back.

with the sweet sweet scent of lavatory in the air, smooching might be an option...

I look around our packed aircraft and sigh because I believe that flying has lost all of its glamor. In reality, I have no idea. In my head air travel was once all martinis, silver, supple leather, jaguars, and fur-lined hoods, Now we sit in CRJ 700s, round bodies splurged next to one another so that if you popped the roof off the plane and flipped us over we’d be a nicely formed human Jell-O mold.  Jiggle jiggle.

I’m flying from Grand Rapids to Chicago and on to Boston.  My reading material is stranded in my gate-checked bag but I can take in enough by reading the headlines of the USA Today of the man sitting in front of me through the crack between the seats.  I exhaust each page faster than he does because he has the luxury of seeing all of the text.  He’s doing a great job of dominating his air space.  Flying may not be glamor, but there is no argument that it’s not sport.  An elite athlete in the sport of economy-passengering is trained at jumping into line at the earliest possible time for his or her boarding number, manipulating overhead bin space without making eye contact with others, and maintaining the largest sphere of air around his or her seat via body position and reading material.  The USA Today man has played his seat mate for a chump and it’s clear who will not have a place on the podium.

To cap off this fantastic experience, the flight attendant reads off connecting gate information for more people than are on the plane.  Why does she bother?  Do you ever not double check this information once you enter the terminal?  Aside from glorious Virgin America, is anyone experimenting with the flying experience?

It’s now the arbitrary time to shut down electronics.  It’s also my cue for moisturizing my right cheek.  Just in case.

Lined paper makes me feel bad about myself.

I woke up this morning and decided to take on my day by watching three episodes of Greek on Hulu because I was too hungry to make breakfast.  Next, I remembered I had no milk so I watched a fourth episode.  Last week I discovered a bagel store with a breakfast sandwich that is edible if you know to substitute Swiss for the default American cheese.  We should be ashamed, America. I wish I had a bumper sticker that says: Not my cheese. My car is one of the last remaining cars on the road, save the cars in Santa Cruz, CA, that can sport bumper stickers at all.  Just last week I peeled a faded “I brake for penguins” off the rear end of my Jeep.  The disrobing left a naked black rectangle that is in such crisp contrast with the rest of the vehicle that I think I might coat my body in bumper stickers next time I don’t want a sunburn.

The woman in front of me in the bagel store was digging through her change purse looking for loose change that would sum up to the price of a coffee because she felt bad using her credit card for such a small purchase.  I waited patiently with my headache and cramped Hulu neck and finally the cashier decided to help me while the woman proceeded with her digging.  I specified my Euro-cheese presence and ordered myself, and the woman who now had around sixty-five cents, an old fortune, and the perseverance of an over-achiever strewn across the counter, a cup of coffee.  Then, I paid with my credit card.

First edition print of "Orbiting the Giant Hairball" by Gordon MacKenzie. Ugly dolls (including handmade child, Aqua) for scale.

While drinking what was prematurely tepid coffee, I played Pac-Man on my phone but wished I could muster just a smidge more effort to pull out the copy of “Orbiting the Giant Hairball” by Gordon MacKenzie I had in my purse.  This isn’t any old copy of “Hairball,” it’s a first edition copy that a coworker let me borrow.  Its supple leather binding, frayed canvas cover pages, and interspersed slices of notebook paper are a tactile senstation.  At some point, I will start reading.

Instead, I cracked open my new Xetoc notebook.  Xetoc is my go-to brand for small (4×6) notebooks.  I use Pearl spiral bound and Kunst & Papier cloth bound for large (9×12) notebooks.  Sometimes I attempt to merge other notebook brands into the rotation because trying every pen in the art store stones me into purchasing paper, but inevitably I give up on the impostors and go back to my regulars.  I purchased this particular Xetoc in June at my first visit to The Container Store, an establishment I’ve always wondered about but have never felt right purchasing anything from because I’m somehow averse to purchasing things to hold things I’ve purchased. It’s like buying a case for your laptop. You shell out $3000 for the computer (If you’re going to get a computer you might as well get a good one) and the thought of another $40 for a case is paralyzing.

Dear computer company (duh, Apple),

Here’s a tip: bundle MacBook Pro purchases with a case of the customers choosing.  Mention this on the price tag, add the extra $40 to the cost, and we won’t blink.  We’ll be ecstatic to have a case included.

Signed,

Someone who needs only the smallest nudge in justifying the purchase of pretty things.

As I cracked open the teal-covered Xetoc, a wave of panic flowed through my unexercised core.  Lines. There they were, marring every page of the otherwise perfect playground.  I looked around. Nobody in Michigan seemed to be bothered by my lines. Lines! On paper! I feel sick just thinking back to this morning, though I’m guessing that part of the current sick feeling has to do with my late lunch of ice cream and a buttered bagel, in that order.  I can’t function with lined paper. My thoughts are stifled by the endless stream of parallel, and my chicken scratch feels ashamed of the repetitive perfection.  Lines taunt me. Doodle on them and they are still there. Rotate the notebook 90 degrees and they form an impenetrable thought prison.

My day of anticipation triumphing over ambition ended at this very second.  The tactile “Hairball” combined with my love of teal and the consistently inspiring prototyping by Tom at Red Cover Studios sent me home determined to make right in this DIY world.  I sliced the teal cover off of what is now just an expensive stack of ugly scrap paper, and got to work measuring, folding, cutting, and sewing blank pages together, resetting them in the teal cover and inserting a leather binding as supple as the one on “Hairball.”

Deep breaths.

Now, I have a notebook I feel confident enough to use in public, and I’m going start in on “Hairball” until Hulu calls.

The offending lines are sliced out, and new, touch-happy pages are added with a bit of leather love along the binding.